Scouting improvements

This topic is to give you a heads up on what’s being improved in the scouting functionality and give you an idea of how it is going to work. I don’t want to make it easy to find a player’s potential just by clicking a button, but the scouts should give you a rough idea of what the players attribute should look like once he’s fully developed.

Here’s how it is going to work. Right now you can do a scout search every (11-scout_level) turns, as long as scout_level is greater than 0. After the changes you’ll be able to do either a scout search or ask for a scout report on that same frequency.

The scout report is requested for a specific player and will not be generated instantly. It’ll take at least 1 turn and can take more depending on your scout level and the player’s age (the younger the player the longer it takes). You will be able to track the progress in a new Scout Report tab in the player’s information screen.

This same Scout Report tab will display the report once it is complete (and of course you’ll be informed by an in-game message). The report will consist in a number for each player skill representing the scout opinion of what the max value for that attribute will be. In some cases there will be no numbers for some skills, meaning the scout could not evaluate them. The report will be less accurate if you have a low scouting level or if the player is too young.

The report will be available to the team for a period of time (I’m guessing 3 seasons) and you won’t be able to ask for a new report of the same player before 1 season has passed. There will be a new Scouting screen separated from the Search screen where all the existing reports will be displayed.

I kinda like it, but how about the small teams with these changes? If you put time to get a report back from your scout then the teams with scouting 10 will “steal” everything away before you even get a report back.

For example: if a 19 year old players get’s listed you want a report asap. If a big team get’s a report in 3 ticks and a small team in 10 ticks, the small team will never be able to buy a player trough the scout report. I think small team still won’t use the option scouting then.

I still have 2 questions:
- Will the the new scouting report work for all players? Transferlisted or not?
- Will it make you able to scout the potential of your own youth academy players? I hope not because only crap players will be on the (free) transferlist.

Yes, the report will work for all players. In the future we’ll end up allowing transfer proposals for non-transfer listed players anyway.
Yes, the scout report will work for your own youth academy players, but as I said they will be less accurate for such young players.

As long as you make it generally not accurate I’m ok with it, this should give the manager an opinion, which as he’s own may be wrong. Even for older players you should not make it too accurate. They could be more accurate telling you when players have done improving, that would be nice and not too harmful…

Finally an update! The basic mechanism is ready, once you request a report for a player you will see the results immediately. The accuracy of the results will be based on the player’s age (more accurate for older players) and your scouting level. It you will never have 100% accuracy, except by chance. Each report will last for 3 seasons and a new report can be requested for the same player after 1 season has passed. Once you request a new report the old one will be removed.

Next steps:
- limit scout report requests using the same mechanism limiting scout searchs
- create a screen with all scout reports for the team
- delete expired reports during the tick

Not yet. There will be a scouting entry in the top menu that will contain both the current scout searches and the new reports feature. The existing Search menu entry will server only for general searches of managers, teams and players by name.

“and you won’t be able to ask for a new report of the same player before 1 season has passed.”

So I scouted all my (younger) players, and want to scout them again in the new season. So the only way is to check all scouting reports, and to write down in Notepad for every player when the scouting report was made?

Quoting Alexander: “Then perhaps Gabriel could explain what’s going on and what to expect from this scouting system. I just had another player re-scouted – he’s 19 years old MD and went from potential passing = 94 to potential passing = 79 which is his current ability. If this is the level of inaccuracy to be expected from the scouting system I would rather be without.”

I would also like that. I know “the scouts should give you a rough idea of what the players attribute should look like once he’s fully developed.” but at the moment it just looks random.

i think the scouts were put in place to make it SEEM progress was being made. so far i agree with alex. if your going to do something then do it right…. am i wrong ? i hope that a simple mistake was made with these scouting reports. at least make them consistant

…. for what it’s worth, I love the scouting system and it works EXACTLY the way it is intended to. You have to be a little bit smarter as to how you choose your players. Also, if you don’t like the scouting system… don’t use it. Spend your points somewhere else.

I think perhaps a color coded addition based on scouting level could help GMs out.
How about color coding the accuracy of a specific rating?

for example, red means not accurate, green means partially accurate and blue means very accurate?
I guess its another addition to the current scouting system that can help improve the quality of the scouting feature.
It can be up to the players to remember which rating was accurate and which wasn’t… I guess it CAN be the same feature as it is now but at least it will allow players to visually see which ratings aren’t really true and which ones should be remembered for the future…

admins can either make the color coding static (meaning only 1 blue max per report) or add more randomness to it, 1 report could have 1 blue and another one can have 2 blue ratings and another 0 blue ratings…

these are just ideas i’m throwing out there, not sure if its complicated to implement or not…

IMHO if the scouting reports are to be “very accurate” you shouldnt be able to do so many scouts during a season… even level 10!
Maybe fixing the number of scouts by 3 per season for every scouting level( or another small number), and the level could be used for the accuracy of each skill reported using the " color idea " of Charles…

I don`t trust the scouting system specially in younger players! But it can give you a good idea in older players…